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Censorship Industrial Complex

Retired judge says Freedom Convoy organizers on trial represent all opponents to current government

Published

2 months ago

14 minute read

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Brian Giesbrecht

Hold the line

The marathon trial of Tamara Lich has resumed. This is definitely the most high-profile trial in Canada in years. Millions of our tax dollars have been spent to prosecute this Métis grandmother (and Chris Barber). Seasoned prosecutors have been seconded, and all of the resources of both the federal and Ontario governments have been employed to get a conviction. Seemingly at any cost.

So, the charges must be extremely serious? Surely, we are talking about some deadly terrorist attack, or something that involves multiple murders and mayhem – at the least!

Well…, no. That tiny, polite grandmother is charged, essentially, with……. mischief.

Mischief? Isn’t that a charge that is usually used to deal with a kid spray-painting graffiti on a wall, or an inebriated fellow doing something foolish while under the influence?

Not so, in the case of Tamara. They are going after her with everything at their disposal. They are pulling out all the stops – spending millions of dollars of our money to nail this gentle, former physical fitness trainer and bookkeeper on a tarted-up charge of mischief. They seem determined to make an example of her.

But an example of what? Here’s my answer: An example of what will happen to any of us if we express views that the government in power does not like -what our Prime Minister refers to as “unacceptable views” that conflict with his progressive vision. They aren’t just going after Tamara; they are going after us.

If you doubt this, think of any protest in memory that has the support of progressives, where any of the organizers have been prosecuted so vigorously just to teach that person a lesson.

After all, there are no shortage of protests. We have had dozens of indigenous, BLM, climate, and Palestinian protests in recent years. Every large protest attracts some undesirables, who participate in violence and mayhem. The BLM and antifa protests – the one our PM actively participated in despite all of his lockdown rules then in place – toppled statues and did much property damage. Surely at least one of the Canadian protest organizers could have been charged, as Tamara was. Not so.

But the vast majority of the people participating in these large protests simply want to make their point. That’s the purpose of protests. They allow people to have their say, and let off steam. Our western liberal democracies allow such things. In fact, without active citizen participation, our liberal democracies would wither and die. Citizens of liberal democracies must be free to peacefully protest when they feel the need to do so. Democratic governments must be robust enough to tolerate protests, and other forms of dissent.

In the trucker convoy protest the main point that the protesters wanted to make was about government overreach. They believed that the government reaction to the nasty Covid virus was extreme and overdone. The final straw was the imposition of a vaccine mandate on truckers at a time when everyone knew that the vaccine did not prevent a person from either becoming infected with, or transmitting, the virus. When the Trudeau government imposed its vaccine mandate this was known with certainty. The protestors were aware of that, and suspected that the decision to impose an unnecessary mandate was purely political. They insisted on their right to make a personal choice about what went into their bodies, and argued that the vaccine mandate was a denial of their basic freedoms. They wanted to state their case to the prime minister about it. But he had no time for them.

That’s what the convoy protest was all about. It was just one of many protests any liberal democracy has had, are having, and will have in the future.

But in how many of those protests do we find a Tamara – namely one person singled out as a sacrificial lamb? Shackled, dumped in a filthy cell, forced to share that cell with a mentally unstable person, and without even a book to read. And then hauled back and forth to court to be yelled at by openly hostile prosecutors. Followed by a year long trial. For a mischief charge. (Lich describes her ordeal in “Hold the Line.”

The answer is that where progressives rule – that’s here, folks – this only happens to people with “unacceptable views”. The authorities in progressive-run administrations only go after conservatives, because those are the people with “unacceptable views”. They leave progressives alone. Justin Trudeau will “take a knee” in protests he agrees with – but will bring the hammer down with thundering force on any “unacceptable fringe view” that he doesn’t like. Hamas protesters appear to be able do virtually whatever they want – even confining Jewish citizens to “ghettos”, and yelling vile, antisemitic slurs at them. The authorities will simply let it pass. Like Sergeant Schultz in “Hogan’s Heroes” they  “see nussing”.

But if you happen to drive a truck, and insist on your right to decide what drugs will be injected into your body, you are fair game. There will be no shortage of police chiefs and other government officials willing to go after you.

That’s where we are now, with the trial in its final stages. There’s a good chance that Tamara will be acquitted. She is in front of an experienced and independent judge, and the evidence against her is contrived.

But there are many lesser-known people prosecuted during the lockdown and convoy protest who do not have Tamara’s high profile that gives her the ability to raise the hundreds of thousands of dollars she has needed to defend herself. Many ordinary Canadians have been convicted of offences relating to the lockdown and convoy protests for the simple reason that they couldn’t afford the time and money to defend themselves against often unfair charges.

Something similar is happening in Britain right now, where widespread dissatisfaction with government failure to limit and regulate mass immigration – particularly of immigrants who have no intention of integrating- has resulted in both protests, and out-of-control rioting. Mass immigration, like lockdown legislation, is a topic on which conservatives and progressives tend to disagree sharply. The Starmer government’s one-sided reaction to the protests and riots – as in the case of our lockdown regulations and convoy protest – is causing both unfairness and injustice for many ordinary Brits. There is general agreement that the thugs who participated in violence in the riots deserve their fate, and are rightly being jailed. But the vast majority of ordinary Brits, who are appalled at what uncontrolled immigration is doing to their country, are being silenced by threats of prosecution and jail.

People are being prosecuted simply for making intemperate comments on social media.  Some who did not even participate in the protests are being jailed.

Those Britons are receiving the same threat that our prime minister has given to us – if you have an “unacceptable view” you had better not share it. Leaders, like Starmer and Trudeau, who choose to shame and silence half of their populations are playing with fire. They can only survive by becoming increasingly authoritarian.

Their brute message takes many forms. “Two tier policing” is one – namely, the police treating lockdown, or immigration protestors in a completely different way than they do pro-Hamas or BLM type protestors. “Lawfare” is another – weaponizing the law to go after those you disagree with. The Online Harms Act pushed by the Trudeau government will do exactly that. All involve the bullying of people who do not agree with the progressive views now in fashion.

These illiberal tactics threaten the rule of law that has evolved in western civilization through Magna Carta, and on to the present. The rule of law is fragile, and it is not compatible with opportunistic politicians who tamper with it by weaponizing the law to crush dissent, and to destroy their enemies. Those leaders risk seriously damaging our basic institutions with their cynical experiments in authoritarianism.

Canada, like Britain, also sees tension rising over the immigration issue. Most Canadians welcome  controlled immigration. But they want immigrants who intend to integrate into the Canadian mosaic. This issue will become increasingly contentious, and Canadians who are opposed to what the current federal government is doing with immigration must be allowed to voice their opposition. That opposition includes the right to protest peacefully.

We are going to see many contentious issues arise over the next few decades. It is very likely that the government of the day will not like some of the views that are voiced by dissenters. The point is that Canadians must have the right to peacefully present their views, as Tamara Lich has done, without being treated the way dissidents are in authoritarian regimes. Conservative thinkers must not allow themselves to be intimidated into silence by progressives.

And we must be able to rely on our courts to protect those rights. The courts largely failed to protect the freedoms of lockdown dissenters in the COVID years. This has to change, or our individual freedoms will not be worth the paper they are written on. Overreaching governments must be held to account.

There is much to think about as the longest and most expensive mischief trial in Canadian history finally heads to its conclusion. The trial judge will tell Tamara if she is guilty or not guilty. But the Trudeau and Ford government are effectively on trial as well. Was their treatment of this one small lady something that should happen here? Is this what Canada has become? The Lich decision has the potential to be an important turning point for this country.

Tamara Lich did not lie down in front of a tank. She did not spend years in the Gulag. But she has been treated shabbily by the Trudeau and Ford governments. And in her gentle and respectful response to this Big Brother bullying she has taught us something. It is this: Stand up for your beliefs. Hold the line.

At some point the Trudeau Liberals will be relegated to the history books. What will they be remembered for? Trudeau’s imposition of The Emergency Act will certainly be on the top of that list. That is – without doubt – one of the low points in the history of this great country. But surely, the trial of Tamara Lich will be right up there on that list as well. A polite Métis grandmother, imprisoned and relentlessly persecuted for daring to stand up for what she believes in, has become an inspiration for those of us who cherish freedom.

Brian Giesbrecht, retired judge, is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

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Brownstone Institute

They Are Scrubbing the Internet Right Now

Published on October 30, 2024

By

From the Brownstone Institute

By Jeffrey A TuckerJeffrey A. Tucker, Debbie Lerman  

For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.

Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day.

It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours.

Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media.

Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.

As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.

The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.

In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions.

It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks only to this tool which is now disabled.

What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.

We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines? Here is what they say:

Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.

Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.”  All of these stakeholders benefit from the ability to act online without leaving a trace.

To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as services are secured.”

When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in read-only mode now. It is not.

Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one place. For many years,  Google offered a cached version of the link you were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact, the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.

Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th election.

Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives. The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.

Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon. That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one particularly cared.

This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system worked as well as one could possibly expect.

Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device) with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming overlap.

Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.

No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.

All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly accelerated these trends.

One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more memory.

As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.

The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something else is quickly replacing it.

Authors

Jeffrey A Tucker
Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

Australian local council calls for ‘immediate suspension’ of mRNA COVID vaccines

Published on October 29, 2024

By

From LifeSiteNews

By David James

The Port Hedland council cited a report by molecular virologist Dr. David Speicher that ‘evidences excessive synthetic DNA contamination in Pfizer and Moderna vaccine vials used for both adults and children.’

Councillors in Port Hedland, in Western Australia’s north-west, have called for the “immediate suspension” of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, challenging federal and state government policy.

The council cited a report by molecular virologist Dr. David Speicher that “evidences excessive synthetic DNA contamination in Pfizer and Moderna vaccine vials used for both adults and children.” A council statement said testing revealed DNA contamination levels between “7 to 145 times higher than Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) limit”.

In addition, the council claimed that Pfizer vials contain elements not initially disclosed to regulators. “The report raises serious concerns about potential long-term health impacts such as genomic integration, exponential cancer risks, and adverse outcomes due to synthetic DNA contamination.”

The research is just one of many investigations pointing to serious issues with the mRNA vaccines. For example, an analysis by David E Allen, honorary professor at the University of Sydney’s School of Mathematics and Statistics, found that all-cause mortality is up in Australia where vaccination rates are high, and that at least two thirds in the variation per region is explained by mass COVID-19 vaccination.

Troubling results are being replicated around the world. To cite one instance of many, researchers in Japan are warning that Covid mRNA shots are now “affecting every possible aspect of human pathology.” They have linked the Covid mRNA injections to increases in 201 types of diseases.

Rather than responding to the council’s concerns and investigating its claims dispassionately the Western Australian premier, Roger Cook, chose the bullying option. He told the Port Hedland council to “stick to its knitting,” whatever that means. He argued the council “should stay focused on the services and people of that community” adding that “it’s another example of that council lacking the focus on the issues which matter to their constituents … making sure they look after the people, not get distracted by these silly ideological debates.”

It was a ridiculous response, reported uncritically by the government funded media outlet the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Why is expressing concern about a health danger “ideological”? If anyone is being ideological, it is Cook. And surely such a potential danger would be “of concern” to the local community?

The ABC article was an example of the aggressive suppression of non-compliant views by Australia’s political and media elite. Neutral, disinterested reporting now seems all but abandoned in the mainstream media, replaced by commentary from journalists with no expertise.

Cook’s attack on vaccine dissenters has become a routine feature of public discourse. State and federal governments are stridently trying to divert attention away from what they did.

But the Port Hedland Council move is significant because it comes from the local level. When the upper levels of government are compromised, and the executive branch of government is out of control, the best hope of reviving some sort of democracy and focus on the interests of ordinary people may be at the municipal level. It is why anti-lockdown and pro-freedom activist Monica Smit is directing her interest towards council elections.

There is little doubt that there is a growing awareness in the Australian public that something is very wrong not only with the vaccines, but also the government’s response to dissent. Even powerful proponents of the vaccines are starting to feel unease, especially about the federal government’s proposed misinformation bill, a blatant attempt to impose censorship. Dr. Nick Coatsworth, a television doctor, senior health official and one of the most public figures in Australia’s Covid response, has warned against the ‘weaponization’ of misinformation to silence debate.

Australia’s local councils are the nation’s oldest layer of government. They are not mentioned in the Australian constitution because they were formed before it was written. As Australia’s political and government institutions deteriorate, the Port Hedland council is perhaps showing a way that some semblance of democracy might be restored.

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